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This study describes and analyzes a relationship between a teacher with psychoanalytic training and a group of eleven-year-olds in a progressive school. The teacher's personal analysis was of sufficient depth and duration to enable her to accept through experiential insight the basic concepts of psychoanalytic theory and practice.
A teacher may recognize and analyze her own behavior in the light of psychoanalytic concepts where the analysis helps elucidate the classroom situation. She may also guess at the unconscious or preconscious meaning of the child's dreams or fantasies, as these are told or written or painted or acted or symbolically expressed in other ways. But she remains aware that she is only guessing, since her guesses are not confirmed by the child in the special atmosphere which therapy creates. She does not communicate any of these guesses to the child. The teacher may recognize a kind of transference and her own counter-transference. The child, like the analysand with his analyst, experiences the teacher as one or both of the parents or parent-substitutes. But the transference cannot be brought to the awareness of the child, as it would be in therapy, although the teacher might analyze her own counter-transference.
The classroom group of eleven-year-olds was at first noticeably lacking in a feeling of togetherness. Many of the children